Of Garment Bags, Storage, and Progress Elsewhere

In the month’s span where I haven’t put my Regency outfit on for photos, it’s spent time stuffed in a bag on the couch, thrown on my sewing room floor, and then finally hanging on the wall mocking me about staying at the office so late recently. (I found the wool is rather forgiving with wrinkles, but the cotton petticoat and ramie chemise are a mess.)

While I still claim that I will get photos, just as soon as Carl and I can coordinate time at home together during non-raining daylight, I realized that I should figure out a storage solution for keeping the gown and accoutrements together.

The Dreamstress to the rescue.

I whipped up a garment bag based on her tutorial. Mine has a slightly larger pocket to accommodate the shoes and reticule and such (10″×16″). It’s a bit short, though. I think I’ll make a longer one soon, and use this for something else (I have a few other dresses with shorter skirts that could use a garment bag).

I also made a quick tag from the scraps, similar to my gift tag tutorial (but without the custom printing). Perhaps someday I’ll have a full closet of historical outfits!

We were busy this rainy weekend. We bought a bedroom set—we’ve been sleeping on a mattress on the floor since we moved in back in December, because our box-spring wouldn’t make it up the stairs (at the apartment, we just used the rails that came with the mattress set, no headboard or anything, but they require a box-spring). Now we’ll have two dressers (exciting, as we only have one small one now), a bed, split box-springs, and a nightstand.

We decided to paint the room green before it is delivered.

Green to blue in the bathroom, now blue to green in the bedroom… funny world. The trim needs repainting, but in the same cream color, we think.

The color clashes with the blue carpet, but we hope to replace that this summer. And, I scraped more wallpaper in the spare room, which is a scary mess right now. I found the plaster!

The less exciting part is that the section of uncovered plaster is only about the size of my hand…

I even spent time in the sewing room, working on Simplicity 2245. I’m almost halfway done, but I ran out of thread (this always happens to me, it seems—the curse of finding the right color in the stash, but it being a small spool that was already used for another project, I guess). I bought more thread, but the painting and scraping and everything intervened.

The Free Spirit voiles are wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

I hope to get more work done on it this week, but I have until mid-May before I want to wear it. We have to finish painting by Wednesday, though, so that comes first!

How do you store your costumes/historical gowns?